Hydrophone devices can detect pressure amplitude in immersion media such as liquids or gases and in solids as well. Several different types of hydrophone devices are known in the art. New applications for sensing and use of pressure amplitude in liquids, solids and gases, including clinical, sonar, and communication applications require improved hydrophones for calibration, metrology, medical metrology, elasticity of medium, imaging, detection, therapy, diagnosis, and the like.
One type of hydrophone device known in the art is a piezoelectric hydrophone device. Piezoelectric hydrophones may be used for measurement of large frequency bandwidths; however, problems arise from the generation of high temperatures and cavitation effects that are produced by High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) fields, High Intensity Therapeutic Ultrasound (HITU) fields, lithotripter fields or the like. These problems generally could lead to device failure due to high pressure amplitudes. Currently, such devices tend to be costly and cumbersome, and tend to have large apertures which can spatially average certain acoustic fields. For example, existing hydrophone probes have aperture diameters on the order of about 500 μm or more which introduces spatial averaging of acoustic fields beyond 3 MHz. This spatial averaging can lead to errors in detection and faithful reproduction of the pressure-time waveform of the measured acoustic wave and result in poor spatial resolution.
Other acoustic pressure sensors have been proposed as well, including a limited range of fiber optic based pressure sensors that exploits amplitude variations. There are at least two other broad classifications based on the sensing mechanism for these sensors, namely phase modulated and wavelength modulated pressure sensors. Included in phase modulated sensors are Mach-Zehnder interferometers, Fabry-Perot resonant structures and multilayer resonant structures that act as micro-interferometers. These interoferometric phase schemes however, are subject to the optical phase fluctuations which may result in higher amplitude noise of the sensor signal. Phase fluctuations, temperature drift and other problems associated with phase modulated fiber optic hydrophones can cause errors in acoustic pressure measurement.
Wavelength modulated phase sensors employing external Bragg's cells, fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) and distributed Bragg reflectors have also been proposed. These fiber optic hydrophone devices perform acoustic sensing based on an acoustically induced change in the wavelength of optical signals passing through the given sensor. These wavelength modulated sensors are usually distributed along the length of the fiber and have sensing dimensions on the order of a few millimeters. The typical range for sensing regions in wavelength modulated sensors is on the order of about 600 μm to about 3 mm. This large sensing dimension causes the sensors to suffer from poor spatial resolution thus limiting the resolution bandwidth. For this reason, wavelength modulated fiber optic hydrophones cannot be used in many ultrasound applications.
Thus, what is needed is a novel, high sensitivity sub-micron resolution rugged hydrophone probe that would be able to characterize acoustic fields in the frequency range up to 100 MHz while minimizing spatial averaging, phase fluctuations, or both.